My family and I do beach clean-ups here in Hawaii routinely. Here are some pics of stuff we find. We filled that dumpster in a few hours with a lot of voulunteers. The large orange thing next to the dumpster is a highway barricade. It is plastic and had Japanese writing on it. Probably from the Japan Tsunami. The truck is full of discarded fishing gear- some huge poly lines in there. Rountinely here in Hawaii humback whales get tangle in this discarded rope. NOAA will attempt to remove from the whales when they can. Last year a just born calf died along the side of its mother after getting tangled in discarded line. Most of the fishing line is from ships operating thousands of miles away.

We also collected thousands of fragments of plastic down to the size of 1/8" x 1/8". This is what happens to plastic- it never really disapears, it just get smaller and smaller. What happens when sea life eats this stuff?